Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” and Holocaust Literature

humanities Article Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Holocaust Literature Michael Robinson Writing and Rhetoric Department, Harrington School of Communication and Media, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Rhode Island, Kingstown, RI 02881, USA; [email protected] Received: 12 January 2019; Accepted: 19 February 2019; Published: 25 February 2019 Abstract: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has been notorious since its first publication in 1948, but rarely, if ever, has it been read in light of its immediate historical context. This essay draws on literature, philosophy, and anthropology from the period to argue that Jackson’s story, which scholars have traditionally read through the lens of gender studies, invokes the themes of Holocaust literature. To support this argument, the essay explores imaginative Holocaust literature from the period by David Rousset, whose Holocaust memoir The Other Kingdom appeared in English translation in 1946, anthropological discourse from the period on scapegoating and European anti-Semitism, and critical discourse on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism from the period by Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The analysis finds that, in representing the phenomena of scapegoating and death selection in a small town in the US, Jackson’s story belongs to an abstract discourse on Holocaust-related themes and topics that was actively produced at midcentury, as evidenced partly by Rousset’s influential memoir. A master of the horror genre, Jackson could have drawn on her own experience of anti-Semitism, along with her known interest in the study of folklore, to contribute this chilling representation of the personal experience of death selection to a discourse on Holocaust-related themes. As this article shows, the abstract discourse Jackson’s story joined is marked by abstraction, skepticism about, or disinterest in ethnic difference and anthropological concepts. Due to the fact that this article features comparative analysis of Holocaust literature, a sub-topic is the debate among scholars concerning the ethics of literary representation of the Shoah and of analysis of Holocaust memoir. Jackson’s story and its context invoke perennially important questions about identity and representation in discourse about the Shoah and anti-Semitism. Keywords: Jackson, Shirley (1916–1965); Rousset, David (1912–1997); Holocaust literature; scapegoating; anti-Semitism; women in literature 1. Introduction 26 June 2018, marked the 70th anniversary of the publication of one of the most notorious stories published in The New Yorker, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948). In a matter-of-fact style, the story describes modern-day Americans performing the ritual stoning of a woman named Tessie Hutchinson. The community carries out the ritual with an air of tired routine, “speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes” while waiting for it to begin (Jackson 1948, p. 25). Once the ritual is underway, some in the town object on the basis that other villages have stopped performing their lotteries. An older man defends the practice with a saying that invokes the mythical logic of sacrifice: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” (Jackson 1948, p. 27). Hence, the victim will evidently be an anachronism even in the world of the story itself—a pre-modern scapegoat stoned in view of a post office and a bank. At the end of the story, Tessie’s neighbors, who have seemed uncomfortable with the rite while their own fates have been unclear, prepare enthusiastically for the violence. Humanities 2019, 8, 35; doi:10.3390/h8010035 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Humanities 2019, 8, 35 2 of 20 Existing in dramatic tension with the setting and the broader world of the text (“‘Some places have already quit lotteries’, Mrs. Adams said” (Jackson 1948, p. 27)), the uncanniness of this violent rite has probably been the main source of the story’s power. In terms of the volume of letters received by The New Yorker about a story, the impact of “The Lottery” was unprecedented at the time (Franklin 2016). Some of these readers took it for a true story. Among them was a University of Cincinnati College of Medicine psychiatrist who wrote to Jackson, “I think your story is based on fact. Am I right? As a psychiatrist, I am fascinated by the psychodynamic possibilities suggested by this anachronistic ritual” (Franklin 2016, p. 231). Jackson is best known as a writer of horror fiction, and at the core of this story’s horror is a detailed account of a death selection—the ostensibly random process of selecting Tessie as the scapegoat. The narrative describing the lottery resembles anthropological field notes in which a researcher records what unfolds, offering some context but expressing no judgments or emotional responses to the events. The horror builds in the tension between this unadorned style and the high drama of Tessie’s fruitless efforts to save herself in the face of her neighbors’ disregard for her life and their complicity in the process. One sees her initially carefree attitude transform into agitation as she realizes, first, that she might be the victim and, second, that she will be. As she resists, some of her own family members turn on her. Neither is she innocent: when the Hutchinson family is chosen in the first round, Tessie objects by calling for her daughter and son-in-law to be included in the second drawing (“Let them take their chance!” (Jackson 1948, p. 27)), only to be corrected by Mr. Summers (“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie” (Jackson 1948, p. 27)). The process of selection exploits self-interest to sever the bonds of family and turn neighbors against one another. “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker magazine three years after the surrender of Germany to the Western Allies, and the mechanism and details of the ritual invoke the type of brutal selection process often described in Holocaust memoir and histories of the Holocaust. The murder is not represented, making the death selection process central to the plot and placing the focus of the narrative on the personal experience of traumatic selection and separation. In being known but not witnessed, the murder haunts the text. The simultaneous presence and absence of trauma invoke another trope of Holocaust history: the denial of knowledge. In shifting direct focus from the stoning to the experience of separation and selection, the text also emphasizes what historians of the Holocaust have highlighted as one of its most horrific dimensions from the perspective of the individual victim. In their definitive history of Auschwitz, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt conclude, “Gas chambers, crematorium, however you call it.” Half a century later, Sara Grossman was not precise. What mattered was that the men were separated from the women, and the grandmother Feigele and the littler girl Mirka went to the left, and the adolescent Regina, and the two sisters-in-law Esther and Sara to the right. And she is correct. That process of selection is the core and moral nadir of the horror of the Holocaust—the selection, not the gas chambers and crematoria. The Germans and their allies had arrogated to themselves the power to decide who should live and who should die. “As though”, Hannah Arendt accused Eichmann, “you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world.” (Dwork and Van Pelt 2008, p. 403, emphasis added) Furthermore, as Ruth Franklin has noted in Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Franklin 2016), the story resonates with at least one account of the Nazi concentration camps—David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (Rousset 1946), which appeared in English as The Other Kingdom in 1947. In the book, which has also appeared in English under the title A World Apart, Rousset takes an imaginative and literary approach to recounting his experiences. Notably, this once-influential account avoids mention of the Jewish genocide. Instead, Rousset takes a simultaneously personal and universalizing view, one that relates his experiences in Nazi camps to abstract questions about evil and human nature while largely eschewing overt discussion of the role of bigotry and racism in the Holocaust—of the Nazis’ projects of genocide and ethnic cleansing as such. Rousset’s memoir is not an isolated example of imaginative abstraction in survivors’ autobiographical accounts of the camps. Humanities 2019, 8, 35 3 of 20 A review of a translation of the memoir that appeared in 1947 in The New Yorker, where Jackson’s husband was a staff writer at the time, seems to approve of this imaginative abstraction from the specific genocidal practices of the Nazis. There, one reads that Rousset’s book is [a]n abstract and literary approach to the subject of Nazi concentration camps. M. Rousset, a member of the French underground who spent sixteen months in Buchenwald, Neuengamme, and similar establishments, is not particularly concerned with details and specific incidents of life at the camps; instead, he attempts to analyze the pathology of National Socialism. In many ways, this is the most terrifying and significant account yet printed of Nazi inhumanity, because it makes the most sense. The author understood exactly what was going on around him—the mystic need of the S. S. to satisfy an inborn contempt for mankind, and the masters’ delight in setting up little bureaucracies among prisoners and then watching them beat and kill each other until human dignity no longer existed. “Normal men do not know that everything is possible”, M. Rousset says in summation. “The concentrationees do know.” (Rousset 1947, p. 67) The review notes approvingly that Rousset’s perspective abstracts the account from concrete details to a plane of theoretical analysis employing psychological concepts. Furthermore, the result of this analysis is characterized in universal terms: the project is one of exploring the Nazis’ contempt for “mankind” in general, not Jewish people or any other group in particular, and, similarly, registering the camps’ degradation of “human” life.

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